Fresh Egg Ravioli stuffed with Pumpkin

I dug out the pasta maker on day two in the new house and set about making my first batch of proper egg pasta. I nicked Jamie Oliver's recipe but tweaked it as he failed to mention one thing that makes stuffed pasta all the better... adding a teaspoon of milk for every egg you put in the mix makes your pasta much more malleable and smooth than it would be otherwise, especially useful when you are stuffing shapes and trying to stick the ends together!

For 4 people you will need.

250 g durum wheat flour

250 g semolina flour

3 eggs

8 egg yolks

8 teaspoons of milk.

Sift the flour together and pile onto your work surface then make a well in the centre. Put the eggs and yolks in the well, start beating gently with a fork to amalgamate the lot. Once you have a roughly sticky solidifying dough, dump the fork and start to work into a dough ball with your hands. Knead thoroughly until the ball is smooth and elastic and shiny.

Wrap in cling film and pop in the fridge whilst you prepare your stuffing (or just leave for 15-20 minutes until you're ready to cut into shapes).

For pumpkin stuffing you'll need:

1 quarter pumpkin

three fat cloves of garlic

1 bunch of flat leaf parsley, chopped roughly

a nice grassy olive oil

salt

pepper

veggie or chicken stock

Slice your pumpkin nice and thin and crush and chop your garlic. Heat a pan, add a good thick glop of oil and start to soften the garlic. Once translucent, add the pumpkin and coat evenly. Turn up the heat and fry for a couple of minutes, then add a bit of stock and simmer. Only add enough stock to stop the pumpkin burning, you don't want a soupy stuffing.

Be generous with the pepper, add salt to taste and throw in the chopped parsley towards the end. Mash the pumpkin up occasionally with a fork or wooden spoon until you have a pasty, smooth consistency. Take off the heat and transfer to a bowl to let it cool.

Get out the pasta maker, or equip yourself with a rolling pin! I start with the pasta maker on a low setting like 1-2 and feed small balls of dough through two or three times until it starts to become pliable and warm up. Gradually make the settings higher and higher until you have a sheet of pasta about 2 mm thin. Lay out your sheets of past, cut into squares. Add a spoon of stuffing in the centre of each pasta square, damp the edges of the square with milk and fold one corner over the other. At this point I recommend the following handy link for making pasta shapes, as I would be a disaster at explaining them without sounding like a poorly translated Ikea assembly booklet.

Stuffed pasta can keep in the fridge for a day or two, but frankly its more fun just to eat it as soon as possible! Boil some water, place the pasta in the boiling water for about 3-5 minutes depending how al dente you like it. Serve with a bit of melted butter in which you have fried some sage leaves.

Enjoy!

Brixton Follies: Bellantoni's Pasta Shop

This is the first of what I hope will be an exciting little series of reviews of eateries in the newly revamped, renovated and rejuvenated Granville Arcade in Brixton, AKA Brixton Village. Left abandoned and dilapidated for the last ten years or so, a creative arts agency by the name of Space Makers took it over just before Christmas and invited artists, thinkers, entrepreneurs, chefs, writers, cineasts and more to take over the empty stalls and transform them into usable spaces, thus reviving the back of the market with a series of pop-up shops, cafès, even a tiny cinema and street theatre, DJ booths and children's reading clubs.

The Space-Makers end of the market has only been opened a couple of weeks and yet already a few places are making waves in the national British press. Time Out, who recently made it its mission to track down London's best coffee, riled a few readers by failing to include Federation Coffee, by the Coldharbour Lane entrance to the market. More on that later...

The first eatery to catch my eye, not surprisingly, was an Italian one. Bellantoni's is a tiny shop, with dark wood panelled front and large windows which seats about 5 (at a squeeze) people inside and has two tables outside. Behind his small counter, Dario Bellantoni a young chef from Genova, whips up fresh hand-made pasta daily, along with a small selection of tasty bites and, of course, coffee. On the Monday I popped in, there were two baked pasta dishes with spinach and rocket, or shiitake mushrooms, as well as cannelloni stuffed with meat.

Good wholesome warming food, full of flavour and perfectly comforting given the sub-zero temperatures outside. My meal came to £5.50 with coffee, which is less than you'd spend on a dubious Big Mac meal from hell up the road. A few locals from the market strolled in for a chat and a bite as Dario busied himself twisting tagliatelle into nests and dishing out relationship advice to anyone who'd listen. Once he plonked down a small dish of homemade twisted bread beside me and a large jug of olive oil to drizzle I felt teleported back to the Bel Paese all over again. "Tomorrow, he said as I shovelled creamy spinachy deliciousness into my mouth, I will make stuffed tomatoes". There was also noise about a possible baked apple cake.

At the deli counter, a small selection of well chosen cheeses, including the sinful and divine Burratina - a sort of softer mozzarella oozing buttery cream - and smoked Scamorza which is perfect grilled until soft and served on a bed of rocket with thin slivers of parma ham. Neither of these cheeses are easy to find in the UK, so jot Dario's address down now!

The warm red walls of Bellantoni's are strung with chilli peppers and small framed anecdotes and quotes from the Chef, doling out such nuggets of wisdom as "If you know, you know, if you don't know, you don't know". Failing the messages on the wall, Dario's entertaining stories will pepper up your lunch as will the excellent coffee.

Bellantoni's is opposite the art gallery and the Enter the Field pop-up shop

Pasta con gli Asparagi - Pasta with Asparagus

It's asparagus season in Italy and we got a kilo of the good stuff from Terracina to whip up a good lunch with. To make this easy and delicious pasta dish for 2, you'll need:

200 g pasta, go for the tube type or the flat bow-ties.

150 g of asparagus tips

1 huge clove of garlic, bashed

glug of good olive oil

big knob of unsalted butter

freshly ground black pepper

two teaspoons of anchovy paste or fresh anchovy fillets

Heat a shallow frying pan with an inch or two of salted water and bring to simmering point. Blanche the asparagus tips in the water for 3-4 minutes (5 if they're really fat) then drain the cooking water from the asparagus into a saucepan. Keep the asparagus to one side.

Top up the saucepan with more hot water and bring to the boil. Drop in the pasta and stir. While your pasta is cooking, take the frying pan you used before and pour in a good tablespoon of olive oil and a knob of butter and heat until the butter froths, then drop in the bashed garlic clove and swirl around in the butter. 

Add 3-4 anchovy fillets or the anchovy paste

and stir until dissolved in the oil/butter mix. 

Once this is done, add the asparagus tips and cook on a low heat, stirring occasionally. Add a generous dose of black pepper.

Drain the pasta once cooked and add to the pan with the asparagus, coating the pasta in all the butter and oil. If necessary add a tablespoon of the cooking water to help coat everything. Add just the tiniest amount of grated parmesan if you want.

Carbonara con Prosciutto di Parma e Zucchine

What do you do when you've got one egg, a "going-mouldy" courgette and a half-eaten pack of Parma ham sitting in the fridge? Leftovers carbonara!

To make this nifty little lunch (for one) you will need:

1 egg

one small courgette

three or four slices of Parma ham

salt and pepper

a clove of garlic

olive oil and a small dry chilli pepper

100g of good spaghetti

Method:

Heat a tablespoon of oil in a pan and gently fry the crushed garlic and small chilly pepper until the garlic starts to turn brown.

Discard the garlic and the pepper and turn the heat down. Add the thinly sliced courgette and fry slowly on a low heat until they start to turn mushy (10 minutes). 

Boil up a litre of water in a saucepan and add a teaspoon of sea salt. When boiling, throw in your spaghetti. While the spaghetti cooks, mush up the courgettes with a wooden spoon andf add the shredded Parma ham. Break the egg into a bowl and whisk, adding freshly ground black pepper. 

Once your spaghetti is cooked, drain it and pour the spaghetti into the pan with the courgettes and Parma ham. Pour over the beaten egg and mix altogether until the egg is just cooked.

Plate up and serve with grated Grana Padano or Parmesan.

Orecchiette con broccoli

I went to the greengrocer's this morning as the fridge was bare and came across some lovely bunches of purple-sprouting broccoli, a British classic with a very short season. Since one of my favourite Italian dishes is the Puglian classic orecchiette coi broccoli - or orecchiette con cime di rapa I thought I'd have a bash at making it using some good British broccoli instead. Cime di Rapa are turnip tops, or what we in the UK call Calabrese broccoli, tight green sprigs of what looks like broccoli but longer and thinner, with flat, long leaves and tough roots. The taste is quite bitter and marries perfectly with orecchiette "little-ears" pasta as the sprigs disintegrate whilst cooking and nestle in the crook of the ear shapes. 

To make the orecchiette you'll need:

1 cup of semolina flour

2 cups of grano tenero tipo 00 pasta (you'll find it under "pasta flour" in the supermarket)

1/4 teaspoon of salt

1 cup of lukewarm water

For the sauce:

bunches of purple-sprouting broccoli or calabrese broccoli (cime di rapa)

garlic

dried chilli peppers

olive oil

Method:

Mix together the two flours and the salt and form a mound on your work surface. Dig a well in the centre of the mound and pour in a bit of the water. 

Working from the edges of the mound inwards, slowly form a dough out of the water and flour mixture until you have a soft, round ball of dough. Knead this for about 20 minutes until it is elastic and firm. At this point, put a large pan of salted water on to boil. 

Roll it into long, thin strips. Take one of the strips, and rip a pea-sized amount off it in a little ball, the press the ball into the pal of your hand using your thumb to flatten it into a small round ear shape. Continue until you've used up all the pasta dough. 

To make the broccoli sauce...

Your pan of water should be boiling by now, so plop in the broccoli. These will have been trimmed off their tough stalks and separated into small florets and leaves. 

Boil for no more than three minutes. Drain them but conserve the cooking waster which (if you're using purple sprouting broccoli) will have taken on a blueish hue. These are all the good nutrients and flavour of the broccoli which we will now cook our pasta in. 

Once you've drained the broccoli, heat up a generous spoon of olive oil in a pan and add some chopped garlic and pepperoncino: small bird's eye chillies, to taste (the Pugliesi like their spice, as do the Calabresi). Fry these lightly then add in the broccoli, leave these to simmer in the frying pan gently as you cook the pasta. 

Bring the broccoli cooking water to the boil again, and toss in the orecchiette. Give them 3-4 minutes then drain them and add them to the broccoli in the pan. Mix well and coat all the orecchiette with the broccoli and oil and serve with salty pecorino. 

A good wine to have with this is a rich red pugliese Primitivo di Salento...

Spaghetti con le vongole - Spagghetti with clams

(photo courtesy of http://labellacook.blogspot.com)

Put your fresh clams in a large bowl or sinkful of cold, salted water and leave them for an hour to purge them of any sand or grit. Pull the clams out of the water, do not drain in a colander. Scrub clams free of any other dirt, barnacles etc. 

Spaghetti con le vongole - in bianco 

Put some salted water in a deep pan on to boil and in it cook some linguine or spaghetti until al dente.

 In the meantime crush a couple of cloves of garlic with the flat blade of a knife and drop into some olive oil to fry until they turn golden brown. Remove from the oil and discard. Add the clams and cook for 2-3 minutes on a high flame until they have all opened. At this point, remove half of the clams from their shells and discard the shells. Save the rest of the clams, with their shells on, for decoration and put them aside. Put the shelled clams in the garlicky oil. Chop some fresh parsley and add it to the clams along with a pinch of salt and some crushed chilli pepper (depending on your tastes). Add your drained linguine to the pan with the clams and stir it around to coat the spaghetti in the flavoursome oil, parsley and clams. Serve on a plate and top with the clams you set aside that still have their shells on.

Eat accompanied by a crisp, chilled, white Falanghina wine. 

in rosso...

A variant of this is with tomatoes. I personally like to simply chop some juicy small cherry tomatoes, pachino for example, and cook them in the olive oil before adding the clams, smashing them once soft with a spoon.